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"The Sopranos" have some competition -- brown-headed cowbirds.
Cowbirds have long been known to lay eggs in the nests of other birds, which then raise the cowbirds’ young as their own.
Sneaky, perhaps, but not Scarface.
Now, however, a University of Florida study finds that cowbirds actually ransack and destroy the nests of warblers that don’t buy into the ruse and raise their young.
Jeff Hoover, an avian ecologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History, is the lead author on the first study to document experimental evidence of this peeper payback -- retaliation to encourage acceptance of parasitic eggs.
Findings will be published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences March 5.
"It’s the female cowbirds who are running the mafia racket at ou

Students of the evolution of social behavior got a big boost with the publication of the newly sequenced honeybee genome in October 2006. The honeybee (Apis mellifera) belongs to the rarified cadre of insects that pool resources, divide tasks, and communicate with each other in highly structured colonies. Understanding how this advanced state of organization evolved from a solitary lifestyle has been an enduring question in biology.

A honeybee gene originally used in egg production has become an important behavioral modulator and a timekeeper of social life.

For a lucky subset of vertebrates, losing an appendage is no big deal. As many an inquisitive child knows, salamanders can regenerate lost limbs or tails; and as lab investigators know, zebrafish can regrow lost fins. Of course, humans and other "higher" vertebrates must make do with repairing rather than regenerating damaged tissues. Though whole body generation (WBR) does occur, it’s typically restricted to a subset of morphologically less complex invertebrates, such as sponges, flatworms, and jellyfish.
In a new study, Yuval Rinkevich et al. discovered an unusual mode of WBR in our closest invertebrate relative, the sea squirt Botrylloides leachi.

Superconductivity -- the conduction of electricity with zero resistance -- sometimes can, it seems, become stalled by a form of electronic "gridlock."
A possible explanation why is offered by new research at Cornell University.

Why do some individuals sacrifice their own self-interest to help others? The evolution and maintenance of cooperative behavior is a classic puzzle in evolutionary biology. In some animal societies, cooperation occurs in close-knit family groups and kin selection explains apparently selfless behavior.
Not so for the lance-tailed manakin. Males of this little tropical bird cooperate in spectacular courtship displays with unrelated partners, and the benefits of lending a helping wing may only come years down the line. Instead of fighting over females, pairs of male lance-tailed manakins team up to court prospective mates.

Adult male lance-tailed manakin on a branch.

Using a modified ink-jet printer, a McGill University researcher is producing three-dimensional bioceramic “bones” that could one day change the way reconstructive surgery is performed.
McGill professor Jake Barralet, Canada Research Chair in Osteoinductive Biomaterials, Charles Doillon of Université Laval and Uwe Gbureck of the Department for Functional Materials in Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Würzburg, Bavaria, have taken advantage of the ink-jet printer’s ability to print layer upon layer to produce three-dimensional porous materials using the same building blocks as real bone.

Frog skin and human lungs hold secrets to developing new antibiotics, and a technique called solid-state NMR spectroscopy is a key to unlocking those secrets.
That's the view of University of Michigan researcher Ayyalusamy Ramamoorthy, who will discuss his group's progress toward that goal March 3 at the annual meeting of the Biophysical Society in Baltimore, Md.
Ramamoorthy's research group is using solid-state NMR to explore the germ-killing properties of natural antibiotics called antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), which are produced by virtually all animals, from insects to frogs to humans. AMPs are the immune system's early line of defense, battling microbes at the first places they try to penetrate: skin, mucous membranes and other surfaces.

TOKYO 02/03/2007
Japan's advanced humanoids can now serve tea and wash the cup afterwards, but they still need to learn from their mistakes if they are to become real household helpers.
A Tokyo University team this week showed their latest robots which can perform more complicated daily tasks, but the machines still have a learning curve.

Japan's advanced humanoids can now serve tea and wash the cup afterwards, but they still need to learn from their mistakes if they are to become real household helpers. © AFP,Ken Shimizu

The European Molecular Biology Laboratory [EMBL] has developed a new computational tool that makes images obtained with cutting-edge microscopes even sharper. The technological advance and its applications are published in this week's online issue of the journal Nature Methods.
Since the Single Plane Illumination Microscope [SPIM] was developed at EMBL in the early 2000s it turned into one of the most powerful tools in cell biology. SPIM allows scientists to study large, living specimen along many different angles, under real conditions and with minimal harm to the specimen.

Brain damage that was thought to be caused by hypoglycemic coma actually occurs when glucose is administered to treat the coma, according to a study in rodents led by researchers at the San Francisco VA Medical Center.
The results are surprising, say the authors, and may be of clinical significance for the treatment of diabetics in hypoglycemic coma, though they caution that the results cannot be immediately extrapolated to humans.

By analyzing the COSMOS field, the largest field of galaxies ever observed with the Hubble space telescope, an international team of scientists led by researchers from the California Institute of Technology (United States) and researchers from the associated laboratories of the CNRS and the CEA , made the first three-dimensional map of dark matter in the Universe using gravitational lensing effects. This historic first seems to confirm the standard theories on the formation of the large structures of the Universe. This study was presented in the January 7, 2007 issue of the journal "Nature."

Three-dimensional map of black matter in the COSMOS field. © ESA/NASA

The chemical bond between carbon and fluorine is one of the strongest in nature, and has been both a blessing and a curse in the complex history of fluorocarbons.